The halle Freyssinet, formerly known as “Messageries d’Austerlitz”, is a 310 metres long by 58 metres wide shed for goods transhipment which was built in the late 1920s by French engineer Eugène Freyssinet. This remarkable building in prestressed reinforced concrete is located in the urban renewal area of the Paris Rive Gauche Mixed Development Area. This innovative technique for applying concrete was used to provide the shed with an exceptionally slender loadbearing structure (less than 5 cm thick at the roof ridge in certain places). Preserving, restoring and modernizing this “rough-cast concrete umbrella” - listed in the Supplementary Inventory of Historic Monuments since 2012 - was a real challenge. It was necessary to give new energy to this historic building, break its isolation by including two public passages through it, providing space for 3,000 workstations, and introducing new significant architectural elements. The former halle Freyssinet now houses STATION F, a 1,000 startup campus, which is a workplace that gathers all the services required for entrepreneurial and digital creation activities. It aims at creating a greater coherence for a startup ecosystem that was previously fragmented. STATION F is made up of 3 distinct zones: the “Share” forum for digital sharing and interaction, the “Create” zone in the centre of the shed dedicated to startup work spaces, and the “Chill” zone that hosts a 3,500 sq.m restaurant.
STATION F is an urban, architectural and human project developed around a central axis that is the size of the Eiffel Tower!
Project data
Project’s name: Station F – 1,000 startup campus
Address: 5 parvis Alan Turing - 75013 Paris
Surface area: 34,000 sq.m
Client: SDECN/Station F
Client‘s Assistant: REDMAN
Developer: SEMAPA
Landscape designer: D’ICI-LA
Architect: MOM
Lighting designer: COUP D’ECLAT
Engineering consultants: ARTELIA
Project design & construction management team members
Architect: WILMOTTE & ASSOCIES
Historic Monuments Architect: 2BDM
Structural engineering consultants: SAS MIZRAHI
Facade consultants: ARCORA
HVAC engineering consultants: TRANSSOLAR
Building services engineering consultants: BARBANEL
Acoustics consultants: LASA
Scheduling, supervision & coordination / Construction management: CICAD
Quantity Surveyor: GLEEDS
Furniture designer: WILMOTTE & INDUSTRIES
Key figures
1,000 startups
9,000 people (capacity of the building)
3,000 workstations for startups
1 Fablab
1,370-seat auditorium
8 event spaces
4 kitchens
2 cafés-bar
Timeline
2012: inclusion of the shed in the Supplementary Inventory of
Historic Monuments
24.09.2013: official announcement of the project
December 2013: submission of the Building Permit application
April 2014: obtention of the Building Permit
December 2014: start of construction work
June 2016: Halle Freyssinet / 1,000 Startups became STATIO N F
29.06.2017: official opening (Share & Create zones)
May 2018 : opening of the Chill zone